How to Enable AHCI and Turbo Cache for DELL Inspiron 1720 with Windows Vista
In Dell Inspiron 1720 portable, users may experience lock up or system may go into a BSOD (Windows Blue Screen of Death) during PC Restore, manual Operating System Re-Install or even after a hard drive replacement. The current workaround is to set the SATA Operation (this is in the BIOS accessible by tapping F2 after restart) from AHCI to ATA in the BIOS. However, this usually makes the system run slow as the HDD would act exactly like an IDE HDD. This problem is due to the SATA drivers not being installed. Some users prefer to have AHCI mode back. To resolve this issue, just perform the following steps:
NOTE: Before you even begin, download ALL the latest SATA drivers available for your system (in this case the Dell Inspiron 1720) from the Dell support site. You will definitely need them.
1. First, go to Start (or the Pearl in Windows VISTA), click on Run, and type “regedit”, and then press enter (or you can just type regedit on the Search box upon clicking on the Pearl).
2. In the registry screen, follow this subkey (you will really need to manually click on the plus sign next to the entries and navigate till you reach the exact sub-entry):
| HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci |
3. In the “Msahci” key, double click on “Start” in the name column.
4. In the “value data” box, change the value to “0”, and then click OK.
5. Close the registry and restart your machine.
6. Upon your reboot, press F2 at the Dell splash screen to enter the BIOS.
7. In the BIOS, change your hard drive setting to AHCI. Save your changes and exit, this time allowing the system to boot into Windows. At this point, you’ll know if your registry edit worked. If Windows does not boot, simply go back into the BIOS and change your HDD settings back.
8. In Windows, the Automatic Hardware Installation Wizard will install new drivers for AHCI and related things. Pay no attention to this, and DO NOT RESTART when the wizard prompts you to. Rather, install all of the SATA drivers you obtained for your system from the Dell support site without restarting in between them. For the Inspiron 1720, install R154200.exe (Intel Matrix Storage) and R154164.exe (Turbo Memory). Once the final driver is installed, you can now restart your machine again.
9.You may now also enable Turbo Cache (Flash Cache Module) mode from the BIOS menu. On this reboot your system may install one final HDD driver, making you do an additional restart.
This should also work for Inspiron 1520 and all other portables which have ACHI capabilities running on Windows Vista. Just get the SATA drivers from the support site. I have tried this personally on one of my Inspiron 1720s and it absolutely worked just fine. There is another solution found on the link below but it could possibly be for Windows XP systems. However, I can’t really conclude until further tests are conducted. Will keep you posted though! 🙂
The Technical World 
December 2, 2008 at 11:12 am
Wow! This fixed the problem I was having with my Dell Studio laptop after I installed the Intel Turbo Cache card. I searched Dell’s website and Googled several sources and nothing worked until I did what you said and now my lappy is happy!
Thank you!
December 2, 2008 at 7:22 pm
I just wanted to thank you for posting this. I couldn’t do anything with the Matrix Storage driver you posted, Vista said the drivers were up to date, but the Turbo Memory driver also installed new AHCI drivers which fixed all my problems.
Before I got that driver I could only get the system to boot once every 3 or 4 tries. Since you directed me toward that driver, I haven’t had one problem.
Thanks!!!
December 3, 2008 at 6:00 pm
No prob! I’m glad it worked. Hope you won’t have any problems with your systems. Rock on! 🙂
January 3, 2009 at 10:56 pm
Hi, my Inspiron 1720 had a critical crash after a few updates and the usual system restores and startup repairs, chkdsk functions weren’t working.
However, I followed your instructions and 20mins later my laptop is back working! Thanks a million!!!!
January 13, 2009 at 5:24 am
Just thought I’d thank you for the great write-up.
It’s nice to see people helping each other out.
I hope the favor is returned to you.
February 4, 2009 at 3:02 pm
extremely helpful, and formatted nicely! some ppl write unintelligible nonsense, but yours was easy to follow and understand.
thank you SO much!
March 28, 2009 at 7:08 pm
thank you SO much!
Great.
April 3, 2009 at 8:39 am
Hi
Tried this fix but my inspiron 1720 kept saying that laptop did not meet the minimum requirements to install these drivers
Any ideas
tks
Colin
April 25, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I have the same problem as Colin. In my case, when I went to edit the registry, the start value was already set to “0”. however, it won’t boot with AHCI enabled.
April 25, 2009 at 12:18 pm
*Update on previous post*
I did a clean re-installation of Vista with the Dell provided CD. Upon installing Windows updates the system kept restarting after giving me a BSOD. I changed the sata mode to ATA and everything worked fine. Switching back to AHCI would give the same problem.
While trying to follow the article on this site. I found out that the registry key was already set to “0”. Trying to start on AHCI mode would give the dreaded BSOD.
Finally, I did a hard reboot, before I was simply restarting, and my machine finally booted into Vista with AHCI enabled. I installed the Intel Matrix Storage Driver and now everything is fine.
Weird…..